ARTSICK: THE MUSEUM OF EVERYONE
“We are not a partisan organisation, we are not a political organisation, so we don’t have a litmus test for whom we take gifts from based on policies or politics. If there are people who want to support us, for the most part we are delighted. ”
“The claim of neutrality, effectively insists that nothing critical or politically challenging can be expressed without the onus of “both-sideism.” Neutrality, then, not only creates an artificial antagonism between the institution and its critics, but it also neuters political action, or at minimum does its best to defang its impact. ”
“Think of it, ye millionaires of many markets, what glory may yet be yours, if you only listen to our advice, to convert pork into porcelain, grain and produce into priceless pottery, the rude ores of commerce into sculptured marble. ”
I have a glass-half-empty perspective when it comes to culture’s relationship with the art institution. This also comes with not trusting those who don’t have a measure of scepticism included in their daily cocktail of culture. When I think of the museum l see history, civilisation and its discontents. I don’t see inclusiveness, diversity and community, the tick-the-box triad of contemporary cultural propaganda. I see culture mapped out by human desires and disavowals.
Culture, at its most spontaneous and critical best, is inherently temporary. From time to time culture clings to the reified pillars of the museum as acanthus leaves, ossified against the rubble and ruin of civilisation’s historical heft. Yet within these vaulted halls, no amount of desire or disavowal can deny or redirect the knowledge of culture’s patronage from time immemorial by the 1% elite, especially within the colonial-filled halls of the museum.
It is with this glass-half-empty perspective that I will try to answer Aruna D'Souza’s question posed in Art in America magazine in 2019: “What Can We Learn from Institutional Critique?” However, my answer is coloured by composer Leonard Bernstein’s definition of the work of art: “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.”
D'Souza posed the question on the occasion of the Hans Haacke retrospective ‘All Connected’ at the New Museum New York. The godfather of institutional critique, Haacke took a journalistic approach to exposing the big money that undergirds art institutions. One of Haacke’s most infamous artworks details — through rigorous and unrelenting photographic and textual documentation —“business dealings conducted over the course of twenty years by Harry Shapolsky – one of the city’s largest slumlords.”
Installation view of Haacke’s ‘Shapolsky et al Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System as of May 1, 1971’ (1971), Photo: Hans Haacke
Haacke’s 1971 artwork, named Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System as of May 1, 1971, was made in anticipation of a planned solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. However, the then director Thomas Messer, objected to the work (and two other works), resulting in the cancellation of the exhibition six weeks before its scheduled opening.
“The aggressiveness of Messer’s response fuelled rumours that Guggenheim trustees were implicated in Shapolsky’s transactions, though Haacke’s research produced no evidence of such a connection.” Aruna D'Souza cites the Guggenheim policy of the time to hammer home the institutionalised perspective from which those within the walls of the museum viewed their relationship to the outside world in respect to the art they selected and rejected for exhibition: “[We show art that excludes] active engagement toward social and political ends”. D'Souza adds: “Thomas Messer believed that by rejecting Haacke’s work he was purging ‘an alien substance that had entered the art museum organism’.” So, “What Can We Learn from Institutional Critique?” And, as D'Souza rhetorically asks: “In the end, does institutional critique even have a politics and theory of change?”
What I have learned from artists like Hans Haacke and Andrea Fraser, is that institutional critique shows how our subjectivity is always determined by present gains and future ambitions to exist. In the same way there is no outside text in a Derridean sense, there is no place for the artist outside of the institution. Further, institutional critique teaches us that there are no museum walls high or thick enough to prevent us from exposing the levels of institutional affiliation with big money in the artworld. The only walls that exist are self constructed through existential disavowal. As Noam Chomsky says, “The minute we receive our first paycheck, we are institutionalised”.
From a psychoanalytical perspective, this institutional and instrumental denial is called ‘disavowal’. Disavowal per se is the acknowledgement of an ethical or moral conflict within a reward structure, such as a job or relationship, but a subsequent disregard or denial of any conflicts in conscience that may arise inspired by the monetary or emotional rewards one receives from such a structure. Disavowal is self-preservation at its most pernicious. It is borne upon the fear of confronting the clash of conflicting and inconsistent information (cognitive dissonance) for fear of losing out on what one has achieved and earned socially, emotionally or economically. We turn a blind eye when our existence is threatened.
Dopesick – The Slacker family meet to discuss business in “THE SACKLER WING” of the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York.
In the TV series Dopesick (2021) – where the artworld and its pharmaceutical donor Purdue Pharma makes a series of appearances through the lie of cultural philanthropy — the devastating impact of the OxyContin opioid crisis in the United States plays out through the deceptive actions of the Slacker family, who invent and propagate lies to sustain the drug’s widespread distribution to the detriment and suffering of the people who ignorantly swallow said lies and drug.
Two acts of disavowal take place in Dopesick: one, OxyContin daddy Richard Sackler repeats the aria “We are about to cure the world of its pain” every time he is presented with the growing list of the drug’s side-effects and the government’s antagonism towards his drug baby, OxyContin; and two, the narrative of the Virginia praise-the-lord coal miner family, who, after repeated efforts by their daughter Betsy Mallum (including her doctor) to disclose that she is gay, pull down the shutters to parental sympatico.
Disavowal is the psychic process wherein we turn a blind eye towards something we don’t want to acknowledge as true, for fear of losing out on what we have achieved or are working towards. In the Betsy Mallum family’s case – the promise of eternal salvation propagandised by the church. Because, as every god-fearing person knows, gays go to hell. Whereas disavowal in Richard Sackler’s case is built upon the most convenient and violent of expressions “the greater good”, a cover story for his individual ambition within the Sackler family’s regime of sibling rivalry and competition fostered by the originary Slacker patriarch, Arthur.
Dopesick – Betsy Mallum and girlfriend, Grace.
Ironically, the blind eye is the most cloudy and crystalline in the artworld. Institutional critique pulled up the shutters of disavowal to reveal an artworld fully integrated and intractable from the elite. Yet artists like Hans Haacke and Andrea Fraser critiqued the art institution within the walls and the applause of the institution, to have their institutional cake and eat it too, leaving artists and institutions satisfied in their respective radicality and progressiveness to give and take critique on their own terms.
On the back of this institutional meta critique that shits where it eats in the art institution, D'Souza outlines the phenomenon of “musical Haackes”, whereby museums purchase Hans Haacke’s institutional critiques of other museums, i.e., Whitney Museum of Modern Art purchased Haacke’s Shapolsky, et al. in 2007, the same artwork that was cancelled over three decades earlier by Thomas Messer of the Guggenheim Museum.
Along with bingeing on Dopesick and any articles I could find on OxyContin and the Slacker family legacy, I was also gifted the book Culture Strike: Art and Museums in the Age of Protest by Laura Raicovich, the former director of Queens Museum New York. The opening line on the back-cover blurb reads as follows: “A leading activist museum director on why museums are in the middle of a political storm.”
Raicovich’s “political storm” is set within the age of protest and cancel culture, through the eyes of an “activist museum director”, who resigned after just three years (2015-2018) due to museum board politics. The fallout between the board and its director was over the question of museum “neutrality” (a key word in the book, but a word I would define differently in respect to art — more on this later).
These events coincide with then American president Donald Trump’s right-wing immigration policies, and Queens Museum’s decision to decline the Mission of Israel’s proposed event to celebrate the anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel at the museum. Raicovich found herself, and her ideologies, butting heads with the museum board, including online accusations of antisemitism, following the cancellation of the Mission of Israel’s proposed event.
Sam Durant, Scaffold (2017), Walker Art Center
Dana Schutz, Open Casket (2016), oil on canvas, 99 cm × 130 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art
Philip Guston, Cornered, 1971, oil paint on paper on board, 79 × 101 cm.
Two storms play out simultaneously in Raicovich’s book: one, the storm, or successive storms, of protests that have taken place primarily at American museums over the last decade, including the protests surrounding Dana Schutz’s controversial Open Casket (2016) painting after the photograph of lynched 14 year old black boy Emmet Till for the Whitney Biennial in 2017; Sam Durant’s public installation Scaffold (2017) exhibited at the Walker Art Center, which reawakened traumas inflicted by the US government on local Dakota indigenous peoples; the postponement of Philip Guston’s KKK hooded paintings at US museums and the Tate Modern London following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020; and Nan Goldin’s founding of P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), an advocacy organisation responding to the American opioid crisis, specifically targeting the Sackler Family for manufacturing, promoting, and distributing the drug OxyContin through their corporation Purdue Pharma, which has deep financial ties with the artworld in what those in power call “philanthropy”, one of the Slacker siblings calls “social entrepreneurship”, and what realists deem “artwashing”.
However, it is the second storm, the more personal storm imbricating Laura Raicovich and the museum mechanism and subsequent fallout leading to her resignation, that is not sufficiently fleshed out for the reader. All we are given by way of introduction, is the narrative of the heartbroken director, forced to resign from a job she loved, due to personal ideological beliefs of inclusiveness and community not being advocated by the museum in the heated moment of racial and feminist protest. Was Raicovich an “activist museum director” when she was hired as museum director? Or was the activist museum director born within the institution — like Hans Haacke and Andrea Fraser — after being exposed to a museum board on high alert when forced to react to the heightened political and social tensions taking place outside the museum walls? What we learn by way of institutional critique is the museum can never by what Laura Raicovich, as an activist museum director, believes it ought to be, especially in America, where public funding for the arts is essentially null.
Later in the book, Raicovich broaches the subject of private versus public funding in the arts, but this is where she lost me as a reader. Based in a country where the promise of public funding for the arts is a dream for the many and a dependency for the few, this dream and dependency also conditions the way art-making is proposed and made with the public interest in mind.
Although we should be thankful that we can receive financial support from time to time to sustain our art making and its exhibition in Ireland via public funding, the same way art museum boards should be thankful for their elite donors, artists do have to become adept at proposal writing for Arts Council funding. The language used for such applications for funding is very much like the ideological language Raicovich uses in her book. Words like “inclusiveness”, “diversity”, “community” and “public” are the pillars and posts upon which such linguistic parkour leaps and tumbles through institutional hoops. But this is not just word games, the likes of which Arthur Slacker was famed for in his drug marketing, what New Yorker magazine journalist Patrick Radden Keene described as a “Don Draper-style intuition for the alchemy of marketing”. Artists have to commit to a public that is, generally speaking, apathetic to the visual arts, especially art that challenges the status quo.
In this environment of public funding and language games, the artist prescribes to and aligns with the social and political status quo of the mainstream. In this arena of eyes primed for offence, artists have to be continually cognisant of their politics, and how their expressions, especially expressions that are less abstract in form, align with contemporary values and beliefs espoused by bureaucratic institutions. The artist cannot, as Aruna D'Souza paraphrases Andrea Fraser “exist in an antagonistic relationship to the institutions of art because artists are integral to the institutions of art. Art does not exist as a social concept outside its institutionalisation. And so it follows that even protesting a museum exhibition is still a form of participation since the gesture takes meaning from its relation to the art world.”
It is this last line that haunts: “protesting a museum exhibition is still a form of participation since the gesture takes meaning from its relation to the art world.” Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser and Laura Raicovich have created cultural capital based on their antagonism towards the institution of art. Contra Raicovich’s position, it is my contention that artists and institutions should remain neutral, and that the public should bring their desires and disavowals to bear upon the artwork. Let me repeat Leonard Bernstein here: “A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.”
Artists should not be concerned with the political and social status quo. They should be able to express their desires and disavowals without the public in mind, so art remains a raw expression, one that is formed and beset by the foibles and failings of being human. Especially within the white and vaulted walls of the art institution, where art is backed by those who have the capital means, financial motives and luxury of time.
Artists Dana Schutz, Philip Guston and Sam Durant (and many others) may have unintentionally reopened racial wounds with their art, but they and the institution that exhibited the work should not apologise for contextual shortsightedness. Good art erupts into existence; it’s thrown into the world, a die with a dictionary pasted on its infinite faces. Artists and institutions who try to achieve 20-20 foresight after a process of totting up potential ways in which an artwork might offend the public, means art will only mirror the bureaucratic status quo rather than challenging it via an aesthetics of risk. If artists become overtly political, right or left, then their art will become political in the worst way possible. A political art made and exhibited in the eye and storm of public desire and disavowal ends up being a lie, like all politics in the public sphere. If art is indeed a vehicle for diversity, then EVERYONE ought to be invited, including the wheels of commerce, if truth is to be reflected from within & without art.
